Public support for life-saving interventions and peaceful deaths

Public attitudes in the UK have revealed support exists both for life-sustaining interventions and for measures to enable peaceful death in progressive neurological illness.

One in six believe measures should be taken to sustain life at any cost.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge conducted a study that found one in six people believes that measures must be taken to sustain life at any cost even when a patient is in the final stages of an illness such as dementia. However, more than twice as many people would request measures to enable them to die peacefully at this stage. The researchers say this highlights the challenges faced by those providing care and by legislators.

Previous surveys have found strong public support for assisted dying, which includes providing life-ending drugs for the terminally ill to administer themselves, giving assistance to die to disabled people who are not dying, and voluntary euthanasia. In both the UK and the USA, public opinion surveys repeatedly find that around two-thirds of those surveyed are in favour.

However, these surveys often do not capture nuances, say the researchers. To provide more detail, working with polling company Ipsos MORI, the team developed a six-stage vignette featuring a fictitious person living in a care home whose abilities in both decision-making capacity and swallowing are declining. In the final stage, the person is bed bound, unable to swallow, spends most of their time asleep and has no capacity to make decisions about their care.

Around 2,000 people were surveyed, with just over half in the USA, using an online survey, and the remainder in the UK via face-to-face interviews. They were asked to choose between four care preferences: sustain life by using any means necessary, including forced feeding and deprivation of liberty; encourage, but not impose, nutrition and hydration by tube or other means; no intervention for artificial nutrition and hydration, but continuation of oral nutrition and hydration as far as possible; and provide measures to help peaceful death. The results are published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

“Debate surrounding assisted dying goes to the heart of clinical ethical principles,” says Dr Gemma Clarke from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. “Some argue that for a doctor to assist a patient to die is fundamentally inconsistent with their professional role, while others say that delaying death could increase unnecessary physical and psychological suffering, and that patients should have the right to autonomy over their own bodies.”

The survey found very similar patterns in the views of British and American respondents. One in six (17%) expressed a preference for being tube fed when the condition had progressed to near the end of life, a stage where the quality of life available would, to many people, appear minimal. The researchers argue that this suggests that a significant minority have a moral view that life should be supported, even by invasive medical treatment, regardless of the family or medical team’s perception of the individual’s quality of life.

On the other hand, more than double this number (37%) chose to provide measures to help peaceful death at the final stages. This suggests that another, larger minority hold the view that death would be preferable to being sustained by artificial nutrition and hydration in these circumstances. A preference for measures to preserve life at all costs, potentially involving deprivation of liberty peaked in response to stage 2. Around 30% of respondents would prefer to be forced to attend meals, if experiencing short-term memory problems. However, half of respondents would not wish this coercion to continue if the condition progressed such that being fed by mouth would require greater coercion such as the use of physical restraint. These respondents may be expressing a nuanced moral intuition: generally favouring preservation of life over respecting individual choice, particularly for vulnerable people, provided this can be achieved without resorting to physical force.

When it came to people’s liberty, more than four out of five respondents (82%) viewed it as wrong to force people to attend mealtimes if they lived in a care home and had full decision-making capacity.